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Many push back against the essentialist idea that sex and gender are different and question the limitations inherent in a binary gendered perspective. Queer theorists, influenced in part by the work of French philosopher Michel Foucault, usually deal with sexuality not removed from gender but simultaneously, and questioned them both. The movement to reclaim it as an affirmation caught on relatively recently, as did queerness as a theoretical framework, or “ queer theory.” Queer’s not too distant past as a slur explains a lot of the continued resistance to its use. I’m also young and haven’t lived through the widespread use of queer as a derogatory term, so my feelings are admittedly biased. You can’t tell me that you get to change a word with a meaning as beautiful as “peculiar” and I don’t get to take it back from you. I understand that.Īs for me, I’m all about reclamation and taking power from oppressive systems whenever and however I can. It was turned into a pejorative to describe those with non-heterosexual desires and behaviors about a century ago.įor some, there’s simply too much pain associated with the word for so many people. Here’s what I know so far: queer literally meant just “strange” or “peculiar,” indicating a deviation from the norm. I’m not a queer historian and I’ve still got a lot to learn, so I’ll stick to the basics. Queer Is a Slur for Some and a Reclamation for Others Not to set the two in opposition or even to say they cannot sometimes overlap, here is why I think distinguishing the two might help people who are still exploring their gender and sexuality. Yet, even here at Everyday Feminism, we sometimes use gay and queer interchangeably. Like plenty of the names marginalized people call themselves, queer has a fraught history of reclamation, many controversial political implications, and a universalizing aspect that is too contradictory for some. There are people who some of you might call “straight” if you looked at them and their partners and impose genders onto them, but who are actually “queer.” And many gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals do not identify as queer. I am not gay nor lesbian nor bisexual nor transgender. That’s an understandable use of the term – like I mentioned, I interpret it to be partially about giving space for exploring gender and sexuality, and including so many different groups of people demands that space, demands a challenge to stability.Ĭertainly a wide variety of non-heterosexual, non-cisgender folks are queer.īut though queer might cover some part of that spectrum, it is not limited to it. Some use it to encompass all non-heterosexual, non-cisgender identities. And when I first began to have these self-revelations, I also knew that I needed space to explore all of these complications.Īs I spent time figuring out what they meant, I discovered that if I must have an identification that makes sense to others who need to see me with some sort of stability, it would be “queer.”īut that’s only because, for me, “queer” inherently defies stable identification. I know for certain I’m not heterosexual – without a stable gender, I’m not even sure I could be.
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Additionally, I realized I don’t know what exactly “attraction” means.
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I knew before coming to that particular realization that I’m also not only, and haven’t always been, attracted to men. I don’t know what gender I am anymore, if any. I thought I was gay because I thought I was a man, and I thought I was only and always attracted to other men. And maybe I was for some of that time – there’s nothing wrong with being gay. Originally posted March 1, 2016 by Hari Ziyad at įor a while, I thought I was gay.